UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I used the TOPAS command to get top 20 process information by routing the output to a file. But the output is not very readable. can ayone explain how to read the output, or how to interpret the information?

Thanks!

don't think that is possible. use the nmon utility. it is like topas but better and also has a batch mode. you can also get the same information with the ps command.

well it is too late now as I have a bunch of these files saved.

If someone can at least describe what the format is, maybe I can recover some info manually. Not the best option, but I am new and did not know about this site before!!

Any help appreciated -- I can read much of the file, what I don't understand is why the lines after the first one or two sets appear 'short'. Maybe the command is only sending the delta to the screen display. If that is it I can work with it, i just need to get an idea of what I have *lots and lots* of already.

Thanks!

I do not know for sure if topas works the same as top. I tested with top and redirected output to top.out (that is what you did, right?). I then used strings to filter out the screen positioning characters and then I did some more filtering. Perhaps that works for you and then you can take it from there:

Code:

strings top.out | sed '/\^[/d;s/^(B//'

Output:

Code:

top - 09:11:49 up 31 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.06, 0.03, 0.05
Tasks:
  75
   1
  74
   0
   0
Cpu(s):
  0.0%
  0.3%
  0.0%
 99.7%
  0.0%
  0.0%
  0.0%
  0.0%
Mem:
   255908k
   246304k
     9604k
    32500k
Swap:
   433712k
        0k
   433712k
   151816k
    1 root      20   0  2980 1864  544 S  0.0  0.7   0:02.66 init
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
[...]
etcetera

In future you could either use ps or e.g. sar for this purpose or perhaps you can select command line options that save topas information without the screen information, like top has.